DreamBerry: Can We Get Some BlackBerry Browser Plugins???

It has been a LOOOOONG time since I wrote my last DreamBerry post. In DreamBerry articles we try to highlight something we wish RIM or developers will create for BlackBerry users. This time I wanted to focus on the BlackBerry browser and one of the things I miss the most when browsing from my BlackBerry.

I WANT PLUGINS! I know that Firefox plugins slow down the browser a bit but they provide amazing functionality that I wish I had on my BlackBerry. Awhile back some developers stepped in to create one or two BlackBerry browser plugins like a Bit.ly plugin but I want more.

Here are the kinds of plugins I want to see. I am not sure if they are possible with the current BlackBerry browser but I sure hope they will be coming with BlackBerry 6!

Save Passwords – RIM definitely needs to integrate a password manager for the BlackBerry browser. I should not have to keep on putting in my password on every website. RIM already has a password safe. How hard would it be to integrate it into the Browser? Pretty please RIM?

Sync Bookmarks – We could really use a bookmark synchronizing tool like Xmarks for the BlackBerry browser. When I add a bookmark from my computer I should be able to access it from my BlackBerry. Browsers like Chrome & Opera already have this as a standard feature. Can’t we also get it for BlackBerrys?

GreaseMonkey – Now this would be an awesome plugin. GreaseMonkey for Firefox is a must have plugin which lets you integrate your own JavaScript plugins in a page. Like you can automatically reformat items or any of the thousands of scripts available at userscripts.org.

Translator Plugin – A plugin to automatically put a website through Google Translate or some other machine translation so you can read it. Would this really be hard to do???

Browser Widgets – It would be really cool if we could get some widgets in BlackBerry 6 like a weather widget that would automatically update a site on a regular schedule. I know you can do this with synchronized bookmarks but it is not elegant at all.

User Agent Switcher – It could be really cool to be able to change your user agent to whatever you want. Not sure if RIM would be cool with this.

A developer tool – I use developer tools like FireBug and Web Developer Toolbar all day to do things like disable cookies or view the HTML. RIM already lets you view the HTML with a shortcut but they do not give you access to see what CSS or JavaScript or images were loaded on a page. RIM really needs such a tool or at least a good desktop alternative if they want web developers to take mobile development for BlackBerry seriously.

Any other plugins you can think of that you wish were available for the BlackBerry Browser? Let me know in the comments!

Some of these can actually be implemented to a certain degree with the BlackBerry browser improvements in 5.0. The difficulty is the only way to do so is to create your own browser app building on RIM’s browser apis. And even though the BrowserField2 makes it more feasible, there’s a lot of work just to get a browser app up to par with what BlackBerry includes as their native browser. Still the integration with the password manager, etc would still be missing since the api calls necessary to pull it off aren’t there, and some of the apis that are in place don’t always give the full level of detail to do what you need them to do. I’ve got pretty much the same list of wants, adding tabs (which were sort of doable since 4.0).

From what I’ve seen, using menu apis within the BlackBerry’s browser at most gives the current url. Nothing on what link might be highlighted or anything else. Trying to go any further means writing listeners for specific domain requests, which by default is disabled for IT permissions, and appears to affect any app that makes a request, not just the browser.

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